Reaching Out: Think Family
The Social Exclusion Taskforce conducted the Families at Risk Review from 2007 to early 2008. This work is now being taken forward by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, including management of the Family Pathfinder programme.
On Monday, 18 June 2007 Hilary Armstrong Minister for Social Exclusion launched the first part of the Families at Risk Review ‘Reaching Out: Think Family’.
It will clearly show the dramatic impact that parent–based family circumstances have on the outcomes and life–chances of children. It demands a more family–focused approach from agencies that work with adults and those that work with children.
It looks at the most excluded 2% of families who have not been lifted by the rising tide of living standards and increased opportunity, and who remain in poverty with complex needs, multiple problems and low aspiration.
This is the first part of the review, which sets out the analysis and emerging themes, with full policy recommendations to come out after the summer. This document is about setting down a marker that substantial change is needed in the way we work with these most at–risk families who need a targeted, specialised, whole–families approaches. It is also about making sure the different parts of the system around families work together.
Our transformation in children's services is having an impact on the opportunities of our most disadvantaged children. We want to build on this success by tackling the problems that the adults in the family face and which have such damaging consequences for the children.
The vast majority of families are a source of strength and protection. However, they can also face challenges. Parental and wider family problems such as poverty, parental worklessness, lack of qualifications, parental mental health, substance abuse, poor housing, and contact with the criminal justice system can cast a shadow that spans whole life'times and indeed passes down the generations. These family experiences can limit aspiration, reinforce cycles of poverty, and provide poor models of behaviour that can impact on a child's development and well–being, with significant costs for public services and the wider community. They damage the ability of children to build up resilience to problems or to benefit from the opportunities they are given.
At the moment adults' services don't sufficiently take account of the implications for the family when, say, an adult is taken into prison or has mental health problems.
We want to extend the benefits of the Every Child Matters approach, which has a common vision, clear accountability, joined–up working, information sharing and core processes and assessments. We want to broaden this approach to the whole family so that adults' and children's services work together to tackle the root causes of children's disadvantage that often lay in the difficulties of their parents.
This is about early intervention – breaking the cycle that is passed down the generations, by tackling the drivers in the wider family environment that contribute to poor outcomes for the children and for child poverty. It is also about never giving up on families and looking for every opportunity to support them.
It's about joined–up working – getting agencies to talk together, sharing information and concerns about a family, making sure that where wider problems show up services work together effectively in the best interests of the family. Particularly agencies that may not have a history of working together like prisons and children's services to ensure the family gets the support it needs when a parent goes into prison.
It's about tailoring support, and making sure that the families are treated according to their individual needs, rather than expecting one–size–fits all universal services to find these families. It's about getting all agencies working with individuals to instead ‘think family’.
This is not a debate on the shape of families and we will not try to incentivise or engineer particular family structures – this is not the job of government. Instead it will look at the individual needs of families suffering exclusion, the wider barriers to opportunity, and the risk factors that parents face that impact on their children.
Government has a responsibility to work with families to ensure every child gets the best start in life.
This document sets out a vision for a more coherent, effective, personal, problem–solving approach to excluded families to enable them to transform their life–chances and break the cycle for their children.
